And while I don’t think there is ever one single good way to rank things, I do have to admit that I find the Portland Start-up Index to be an interesting way of looking at things.

And then there was Aaron Hockley crossing the 5000 tweet mark last night.

And that got me thinking. I began to wonder: Who is at the top of the Twitter heap when it comes to Portland startup and tech types? Who has the most “influence”? Who is the holder of the mythical “Twitter juice”?

I had a fitful sleep of metric-ridden dreams, last night.

So, this morning, I—very unscientifically—started combing through the Portland metropolitan area Twitter types. Trying to figure it out.

After some fits and starts, I had gathered a number of folks from the area. I had their number of followers, the number of people they were following, and the number of updates they had.

Some of the more prolific people weren’t exactly “tech” or “startup” types, so they were the first ones I cut them from the list.

Then, I looked at the number of updates that these folks had. And I cut some of the people with lower numbers of updates.

Then, I looked at the number of followers each of these people had. And the number of people they were following.

To me, it seemed that influence has something to do with the number of people who listened each time a person updated. But, logically, not all of these people were listening from day one, and because of that, a direct multiplication would be inaccurate and misleading.

So, I massaged those numbers a little. And mucked with some of the weighting. Then I took all of that unscientific research and ran it through the Silicon Florist 5000.

And guess what it spit out? I was surprised. And I was wrong with my #1 guess. I’m willing to bet you were, too.

I love this type of stuff. Totally interesting, and totally pointless! the type of thing my wife makes fun of me for!

I’d love to see the formula or at least the thresholds you used to include/exclude someone. One thing to consider is the time someone has been on Twitter. Both for the aspect of seniority and the number of tweets. A new user like myself only has 500 updates, but thats within the last 2 months.

That’s awesome and a great introduction to few of those folks I don’t currently follow. I do see the oregonian as sort of the oddman out since they’re not literally part of the tech community but meh it’s all good.
Nice to see @verso on there, the top ten is full of people I’d like to emulate and hopefully no one on the list minds being somewhat of a mentor as I transition from a wee acolyte I am in the community to the happy go lucky portvangelisticexpialidocious (oops that word got away from me)as I was saying happy go lucky free (as in beer (and/or bacon)) source community wonk I wish to be.

Also upon reading what I just wrote I do believe that this comment should be taken out and shot.

Rick, I’m surprised nobody has said this, so I will don my flame-proof underwear and say:

1. I love that you’re doing this. It’s important to know who to connect with locally.

2. I would argue whether sheer _volume_ of updates is any indicator of whether a person is of influence or not. I could tweet every 10 minutes about the weather and any number of irrelevant things. Would my volume of updates make me more influential? Probably not.

Less is more in today’s information economy.

Relevance is what counts, although this is admittedly impossible to measure on twitter.

The number of followers (listeners as you put it) is somewhat relevant, but that too can simply be an indicator of something other than influence. For example, there’s a guy I’ve seen who is literally “buying” friends by giving away a free MacBook Air when he reaches X level of followers. Is he influential? Some would say yes. Others would say he’s just full of himself.

I’d be much happier doing 3-6 updates per day – relevant ones, than I would one every 10 minutes. And doing so doesn’t make me any less influential. In fact it probably makes me more influential because folks would actually _read_ them. In the same breath, I’d be much happier with 100 to 500 of the _right_ followers/relationships than I would with 10,000 to 15,000 unknowns.

That’s my two cents on this Thursday morning as I type from the train on EVDO downtown Portland.

[...] Portland’s top 30 tech Twitter-ers “And that got me thinking. I began to wonder: Who is at the top of the Twitter heap when it comes to Portland startup and tech types? Who has the most ‘influence’? Who is the holder of the mythical ‘Twitter juice’?” [...]

At the possible risk of knocking myself off the list, I’m kind of amazed that Rick Olson (technoweenie) isn’t on here. He’s a Rails core committer and has a couple of thousand followers (and has been a local for awhile now). Also Chris Anderson (jchris) who’s now a Couch DB core committer is in a similar spot. For that matter, Matt Howie (mathowie), Andy Baio (waxpancake), and Cabel Sasser (cabel) are all locals with relatively huge followings.

I wonder how many other widely known Portland tech types fly below the radar like this.

[...] from the list whom I would expect to be there—like Marshall Kirkpatrick and some of the Top 30 tech Twitter types from the Portland area from last year—this is still a great way to discover some local folks who you might want to [...]

[...] from the list whom I would expect to be there—like Marshall Kirkpatrick and some of the Top 30 tech Twitter types from the Portland area from last year—this is still a great way to discover some local folks who you might want to [...]

No time? Get the highlights

Every Friday, get an email with the top posts, hottest jobs, what's happening in the community, and must attend events.